Really, your original post is inconsistent with itself. In a completely open-ended game, there would be no levels, no endings, and no "doing well". It would be a total void. Like nihilism.

Sure, there could be characters, and you could get "missions" of a sort, but nothing would be "better" or "worse" unless the player decided to support faction X and used the usefulness of his actions as a conscience.

Iron Chef Carnage:

I agree...like Sims Online.

The only way you could ''script'' an Open-ended game would be to have the game self-create smaller plotlines and scenarios for the player. The only problem is that the game would never, ever be conclusive and would eventually lead to two possible outcomes

1) The player is a complete master of everything in the game world, nothing is a threat or a challenge - the player would eventually get bored as the game will never have anything worth doing

2) The game will start creating conflicting or repeating scenarios, ruining the idea of an ''infinite'' universe.

The Frontier Elite 2 game was like this; I found it strange how Braben went to all the trouble of mapping the entire galaxy, but the game itself only really happened in a small portion of this. Frontier eventually led to both of the two outcomes, you eventually became a master of the game and the scenarios within the game began to get repetitive and a real chore to play through.

Whilst the idea of having military factions and personal ''elite'' ratings was appealing, they eventually amounted to couriering things around and doing the same thing in the same way until the game tells you that you''ve done it enough for the next level.

If you were to attempt a pseudo open-ended game, you''d need several strong and intertwining plotlines, hopefully ones that if you progress in one, it affects the other plotlines, meaning that how you play the game can and WILL affect everything in it. This allows a higher degree of replayability, especially if small actions can affect things in a huge way somewhere else in the game.

You''d also need a form of self-generating plotlines, many extra stories and ''twists'' that probably only happen a few times; these can be separate to the mainplotlines, helping to remove the conflicting stories idea.

Morrowind had an element of this, unfortunately I found Morrowind soon became tedious and eventually led to me walking around from place to place, repeating the same actions I have done before. This was also what happened with Elite, and it really destroyed my sense of progress.

I think it could be made to work if there was some kind of universal commodity of victory. I use the word "commodity" here loosely.

Take Nietzsche''s ubermensch. He exists in a world beyond the horizon of the infinite, and has to universal ethical standards to govern his behavior. And yet, he knows the better from the worse. He isn''t bound by religious guidelines, or sociel mores, or any other sort of normative moral standards, but he is guided by his will to power, and his understanding of the interaction between the Dionysian and the Appolonian.

So, build a world in which a man''s excellence is the measure of his success. Not his fame, or his wealth, or even his achievements, but his greatness. The closest thing I''ve ever seen to a truly open-ended world was Escape Velocity.

It was a 2D space flight/trading/fighting type of game, and you were a freelance pilot. You could get jobs in bars or from the equivalent of classified ads, and your performance affected your reputation, wealth etc. I eventually completed all the scripted missions and got all the secret upgrades and bought the fanciest ship, but after that, I kept playing.

I used my own sense of chivalry as my guide. I would take low-paying jobs escorting convoys, and pride myself on not only protecting the convoy, but on making every system I visited a little bit better. I''d fight pirates, assist defending militias, rescue stranded crews, and otherwise spread peace and goodness throughout the galaxy. In time, I even stopped killing. I''d disable pirates, and then leave them there for patrols to find, although the patrols generally just killed them. It was a very great deal of fun.

True Crime allows a similar system. The "Good Cop" rating is just the sort of conscience that would make this sort of thing work. Arresting criminals rather than killing them, using "neutralizing" arm or leg hits rather than head shots in gunfights, and cuffing belligerent drunks instead of beating them to a pulp and leaving them in the street is just the sort of thing that makes that game so much fun. Sometimes, I even stop at red lights.

Of course, Nietzsche and I both know that calling these things "good" is self-deceptive, and just casts a veil over the morally devoid world (game world for me, real world for Nietzsche, but I''m not quite that hardcore yet), but we both also know that it''s the tragedy and parody of this world that makes life worth living. It might even be enough to make a game worth playing.

Your point about making the galaxy feel better is interesting, is this created by you or did the game really change around you once you disabled pirates?

What I mean is: Once you popped the bad guys, did they stop frequenting the systems you were in and create a new base for themselves elsewhere?

I think that sort of dynamic would really help make a game open-ended; it''s a macro-level event triggered by the micro-actions of the player

No, you didn''t affect the universe that directly. It''s a pretty old game, and quite simple, really.

So to answer your question, I was solely responsible both for assigning myself the task and feeling properly rewarded by completing it. Of course, looting their ships never hurts, but I had enough money that crippling them and then leaving them with no tangible profit (and even some cost for missiles etc.) actually made me feel better than looting/destroying them.

If you could actually "clean up" a system, or give it a reputation for having a badass "sheriff", I think the game would have been even better. It would not be difficult, I think, to build such a feature into the reputation system of the game, which already evaluates you on system, faction, and even personal levels.